Many Cargoes Part 39

She looked at Captain Crippen as though he hadn't quite come up to her expectations.

"And now," said Pepper, speaking with great cheerfulness, "it's me that's got to have the broken heart. Well, well."

"It's a most interesting case," cried Miss Winthrop; "and, if you wait till I fetch my camera, I'll take your portrait together just as you are."

"Do," said Mrs. Pepper cordially.

"I won't have my portrait took," said the captain, with much acerbity.

"Not if I wish it, dear?" inquired Mrs. Pepper tenderly.

"Not if you keep a-wis.h.i.+ng it all your life," replied the captain sourly, making another attempt to get his head from her shoulder.

"Don't you think they ought to have their portrait taken now?" asked Miss Winthrop, turning to the ex-pilot.

"I don't see no 'arm in it," said Pepper thoughtlessly.

"You hear what Mr. Pepper says," said the lady, turning to the captain again. "Surely if he doesn't mind, you ought not to."

"I'll talk to him by-and-bye," said the captain, very grimly.

"P'raps it would be better if we kept this affair to ourselves for the present," said the ex-pilot, taking alarm at his friend's manner.

"Well, I won't intrude on you any longer," said Miss Winthrop. "Oh! Look there! How rude of them!"

The others turned hastily in time to see several heads vanish from the window. Captain Crippen was the first to speak.

"Jem!" said Mrs. Pepper severely, before he had finished.

"Captain Budd!" said Miss Winthrop, flus.h.i.+ng.

The incensed captain rose to his feet and paced up and down the room. He looked at the ex-pilot, and that small schemer s.h.i.+vered.

"Easy does it, cap'n," he murmured, with a wink which he meant to be comforting.

"I'm going out a little way," said the captain, after the rector's daughter had gone. "Just to cool my head."

Mrs. Pepper took her bonnet from its peg behind the door, and, surveying herself in the gla.s.s, tied it beneath her chin.

"Alone," said Crippen nervously. "I want to do a little thinking."

"Never again, Jem," said Mrs. Pepper firmly. "My place is by your side.

If you're ashamed of people looking at you, I'm not. I'm proud of you.

Come along. Come and show yourself, and tell them who you are. You shall never go out of my sight again as long as I live. Never."

She began to whimper.

"What's to be done?" inquired Crippen, turning desperately on the bewildered pilot.

"What's it got to do with him?" demanded Mrs. Pepper sharply.

"He's got to be considered a little, I s'pose," said the captain, dissembling. "Besides, I think I'd better do like the man in the poetry did. Let me go away and die of a broken heart. Perhaps it's best."

Mrs. Pepper looked at him with kindling eyes.

"Let me go away and die of a broken heart," repeated the captain, with real feeling. "I'd rather do it. I would indeed."

Mrs. Pepper, bursting into angry tears, flung her arms round his neck again, and sobbed on his shoulder. The pilot, obeying the frenzied injunctions of his friend's eye, drew down the blind.

"There's quite a crowd outside," he remarked.

"I don't mind," said his wife amiably. "They'll soon know who he is."

She stood holding the captain's hand and stroking it, and whenever his feelings became too much for her put her head down on his waistcoat. At such times the captain glared fiercely at the ex-pilot, who, being of a weak nature, was unable, despite his anxiety, to give his risible faculties that control which the solemnity of the occasion demanded.

The afternoon wore slowly away. Miss Winthrop, who disliked scandal, had allowed something of the affair to leak out, and several visitors, including a local reporter, called, but were put off till the morrow, on the not unnatural plea that the long-separated couple desired a little privacy. The three sat silent, the ex-pilot, with wrinkled brows, trying hard to decipher the lip-language in which the captain addressed him whenever he had an opportunity, but could only dimly guess its purport, when the captain pressed his huge fist into the service as well.

Mrs. Pepper rose at length, and went into the back room to prepare tea.

As she left the door open, however, and took the captain's hat with her, he built no hopes on her absence, but turned furiously to the ex-pilot.

"What's to be done?" he inquired in a fierce whisper. "This can't go on."

"It'll have to," whispered the other.

"Now, look here," said Crippen menacingly, "I'm going into the kitchen to make a clean breast of it. I'm sorry for you, but I've done the best I can. Come and help me to explain."

He turned to the kitchen, but the other, with the strength born of despair, seized him by the sleeve and held him back.

"She'll kill me," he whispered breathlessly.

"I can't help it," said Crippen, shaking him off. "Serve you right."

"And she'll tell the folks outside, and they'll kill you," continued Pepper.

The captain sat down again, and confronted him with a face as pale as his own.

"The last train leaves at eight," whispered the pilot hurriedly. "It's desperate, but it's the only thing you can do. Take her for a stroll up by the fields near the railway station. You can see the train coming in for a mile off nearly. Time yourself carefully, and make a bolt for it.

She can't run."

The entrance of their victim with the tea-tray stopped the conversation; but the captain nodded acceptance behind her back, and then, with a forced gaiety, sat down to tea.

For the first time since his successful appearance he became loquacious, and spoke so freely of incidents in the life of the man he was impersonating that the ex-pilot sat in a perfect fever lest he should blunder. The meal finished, he proposed a stroll, and, as the unsuspecting Mrs. Pepper tied on her bonnet, slapped his leg, and winked confidently at his fellow-conspirator.

"I'm not much of a walker," said the innocent Mrs. Pepper, "so you must go slowly."

The captain nodded, and at Pepper's suggestion left by the back way, to avoid the gaze of the curious.

For some time after their departure Pepper sat smoking, with his anxious face turned to the clock, until at length, unable to endure the strain any longer, and not without a sportsmanlike idea of being in at the death, he made his way to the station, and placed himself behind a convenient coal-truck.